At this point it’s no secret that I’m a diehard Apple fan. My family bought the very first Macintosh in the mid 1980′s, and I’ve never been without one since.

I’ve blogged before about accessibility features that Apple has put into their products, from their operating systems to the iPhone. While it’ll forever be a debate if they’ve gone “far enough” with their considerations for those with disabilities, the point I continue to maintain is that they seem to take it seriously enough to continue adding enhancements.

We’re on the cusp of another Mac OS update, with Lion roaring in any day now. I for one can’t wait to get my paws on it, especially at its ridiculously reasonable price of $29.99. They’re touting that it’s littered with over 250 enhancements.

Here’s a rundown of some of the touted new accessibility features:

• Addition of picture-in-picture zoom – to enhance the zooming experience and providing greater overall context of how what you’re focusing on fits in with the overall page/screen.
• Support for 80+ Braille tables across multiple languages
• Greater control over how and how much information comes across via a refreshable Braille device
• Greater precision in the appearance of the pointer when viewed at larger zoom levels
• Greater customization of VoiceOver, enabling it to perform in different manners for different activities
• Screen sharing – enabling users to assist other users directly

You can find out about all the new features of Lion at Apple’s OS X Lion Features.

As always, we’ll have to see these features in action to gauge whether they truly make disabled Mac users’ lives easier. Hopefully by the end of this month, we’ll start finding out.

Further reference:

• Current Mac OS X accessibility features
• Apple’s accessibility statement

Tags: apple, braille, lion, mac os x, refreshable braille, VoiceOver, zoom

I’ve admitted numerous times that I’m an Apple devotee. So maybe I’m biased when I laud their efforts in the accessibility realm. However – and perhaps it’s in part because they have always done a good job “getting it” when it comes to creating software and hardware that are both well-designed and easy to use – they seem to at the very least take accessibility seriously and continue adding or bolstering accessibility features in their products with each release.

Mac OS X Snow Leopard is slated for a September 2009 release. As with most of their products, they have an accessibility features page for Snow Leopard and the OS X platform in general.

Among the heralded Snow Leopard accessibility enhancements:

• More robustness to the built-in VoiceOver capabilities, particularly for web browsing
• Major enhancements to their trackpad – which will represent the active window, enabling users to hear what item they hover over, as well as to discern and navigate through multiple items on the screen through finger movements
• Support for over 40 plug-in Braille displays
• The rotor capability – an enhanced capability of the trackpad to enable users to use a “dial” motion for cycling through text word or character at a time, and also to navigate a web page by common items, such as headers, links and imagery
• Technology that to a degree overcomes sites’ accessibility shortcomings by assigning “auto web spots” denoting important elements of the site. One can, for example, assign certain areas of a regularly-frequented site so that, in the future, VoiceOver can skip right to those elements first.
• VoiceOver Commanders – a new enhancement to the VoiceOver admin utility that allows for greater automated actions and keyboard shortcuts

Many of these features, on the surface, promise to offer greater ease of use, particularly for the visually-disabled — from all-around usage of your Mac to web surfing specifically. How effective they are, of course, remains to be seen when Snow Leopard arrives. Also, with just about all the enhancements directed towards the visually-disabled, how will Snow Leopard work for those with other disabilities, such as limitations of motor skills and hearing problems?

Tags: apple, braille, mac os x, snow leopard, VoiceOver